Laboratory evidence shows that when people have to argue for a given position, they persuade themselves about the position’s factual and moral superiority. Such self-persuasion limits potential of communication resolve conflict reduce polarization. We test this phenomenon in field setting, at international debating competitions randomly assign experienced motivated debaters one side topical mot...

Employment may be important to well-being for reasons beyond its role as an income source. This paper presents a causal estimate of the psychosocial value employment in refugee camps Bangladesh. We involve 745 individuals field experiment with three arms: control arm, weekly cash and arm equal value. raises substantially more than alone, 66 percent employed are willing forgo payments continue w...

We analyze the incentives for showing off, which we model as a costly signaling game, and study consequences of norms against such behavior. Prior to competing in contest, newcomer can signal his talent an incumbent. In equilibrium, ability occurs only when is exceptionally talented. situations benefits both contestants: obvious reasons; incumbent by economizing on wasted effort contest. Our re...

We derive a new cost of information in rational inattention problems, the neighborhood-based functions, starting from observation that many settings involve exogenous states with topological structure. These functions are uniformly posterior separable and capture notions perceptual distance. This second property ensures costs, unlike mutual information, make accurate predictions about behavior ...

This paper studies the large concentration of retirement behavior around statutory ages, a puzzling stylized fact. To investigate this fact, I estimate bunching responses to 644 pension benefit discontinuities, using administrative data on universe German retirees. Financial incentives alone cannot explain patterns, but there is direct effect ages. argue that framing ages as reference points fo...

Mistakes and overconfidence in detecting lies could help spread. Participants our experiments observe videos which senders either tell the truth or lie, are incentivized to distinguish between them. We find that participants fail detect lies, but overconfident about their ability do so. use these findings study determinants of sharing its effect on lie detection, finding even when share truthfu...

We leverage a large-scale incentivized survey eliciting behaviors from (almost) an entire undergraduate university student population, representative sample of the US and Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to address concerns about external validity experiments with participants. Behavior in population offers bounds on other populations, correlations between are similar across samples. Furthermore,...

We show that rational but inattentive agents can become polarized, even in expectation. This is driven by agents’ choice of not only how much information to acquire, also what type information. present optimal acquisition, and subsequent belief formation, depends crucially on the agent-specific status quo valuation. Beliefs systematically update away from realized truth with same initial belief...

If gifts are reciprocated in the future, intra-household distribution of resources will depend on premarital gifts such as dowry, bride-price and parents’ gifts to a child such as schooling and nurturing. If such social norms of reciprocity exist, parental income effects on their child’s human capital will be asymmetric, and the effect will depend on the amount of intra-household transfers made...

In experimental partnership dissolution problems with complete information, the divide-and-choose mechanism is significantly superior to the winner’s-bid auction. The performance of divide-and-choose is mainly affected by reciprocity issues and not by bounded rationality. The performance of the winner’s-bid auction is significantly affected by bounded rationality. Contrary to theoretical predic...